Is Advanced Access search engine friendly?

[MarcinSarasota]

I apologize in advance if I get any of this lingo wrong. I try to spend most of my time being a realtor.

I am thinking of rebuilding my main website - www.LuxurySarasotaRealEstate.com. Right now it is hosted with Advanced Access. Is it true that their websites are tougher to read by the search engines? Isn't it true that Google likes websites that are somewhat basic, without alot of flash, graphics, java, etc? I wanted to get some feedback on this because this is my main site in which I get most of my business from. Therefore, I don't want to screw anything up. I used to be in the top 5 of Google for several search terms. I am now found anywhere from 10-20 on those same search terms.

I built a couple of other sites using Microsoft Frontpage and it seems like the search engines like them better than my Advanced Access site.

The competition is getting tougher everyday for the top 10 positions so I want to know if I am shooting myself in the foot with my current host.

Thank you for any feedback or comments.
Marc Rasmussen

[Las Vegas Real Estate]

I'd also be interested in feedback on this. A friend of mine just got an AA site. Did I hear that it uses frames, and that's why the search engines don't like it ---- Morgan??

[HMiller]

I've avoided trading links with many (but not all) AA sites because of framed page issues. However, I've been noticing that more and more AA sites I come across have non-framed links pages which make exchanging links with them more appealing. I emailed the owner of one of these sites and she told me that AA purposely made this change after hearing alot of complaints from their customers. I have to say that I'm not very familiar with AA sites and I'm only commenting on their links pages and not their sites as a whole.

[Vlado Tovarnak]

There is a lot of information about AA sites,

I don't know if this link will work, if not try searching forum for term "advanced access" in titles and filter it to posts where user name is "webmaster" It will return relevant threads about AA sites. IMO you will find there answers to your questions.

[webmaster]

problems I have with advanced access sites
#1 framesets - the majority of their pages are within framesets (This can be circumvented but only to a point, their rewritten static URL's still suck and have variables

#2 duplicate content issues, although they arent getting penalized at this time, much of the content provided out of the box from AA is duplicate and I think this will spell dissaster for them down the road.

#3 limitations on scripts you can input and customization is an uphill battle to say the least

#4 you dont own your website - I think this is just silly, you are paying for a website, content and all, you should own it.

#5 design - they just arent very nice to look at, and you can usually tell an AA site from a mile away, I mean who wants the same site that a thousand realtors have?

Those are just a few points that I have, although there are many more frustrating aspects to AA, what it boils down to is you can rank the index page for a select few terms easily but outside of that, ranking for tens if not hundreds of terms which you can with a custom is 10,000 times harder

[webmaster]

btw dont think if you leave AA that you will lose your rankings, they are quite heavily dependant on the link building you have done to the domain (Good job btw) and it is not due to the fact that you have an AA site.

[Jade456]

Morgan has made some good points. AA sites have some limitations and they are causing me grief. As for ranking well for a variety of terms, my site must be an exception then, not the rule. In AA's favor, if you are not tech savvy at all, they provide an easy to use product to get you started. If you are very computer literate including html, then its not for you.

[webmaster]

It is not an exception Jade, it is just the fact that you have worked 100 times harder than you would have had to if you werent on AA to get multiple rankings, and had a lot of hurldes in the your path. It CAN be done, it's just so much work that you pretty much need to learn everything there is to know about building a website anyways in order to be able to do it, I think with the knowlege you have now, you could easily build your own site in DW and that defeats the purpose of having an easy to use template in the first place

[kensmith]

I really wish I had the time or money to start a non-AA site to see if the rankings would be easier to get then what i had to do to get the AA site to #1. Have been thinking about testing this with a rather basic site and getting the same links I have for the AA site and see what would happen. Personally my guess is it wouldn't be much different, but many other think otherwise. Any thoughts?

[webmaster]

I think ranking the homepage for the main kw would be pretty much the same. A site from scratch to get to the first page of google these days takes between 6-9 months of link building assuming it is a brand new domain. 2-4 months for Yahoo / MSN

Where you would notice the difference is with your internal pages, to communities or targeting secondary and tertiary keywords

For instance filenaming in Yahoo / MSN really helps

area-homes.html
area-real-estate.html
area-mls.html

and of course pagerank propagation is a lot cleaner via non-variable links so internal authority builds quicker.

To really test this though, someone would have to buy an AA site AND make a custom at the same time, get the links the same for both etc etc and let them run head to head, based on the same SEO principles but with no interlinking or duplicate content.